So whatever happened to Covent Garden? These days the place is like an upmarket shopping mall with an opera-house attached.
When I first came here you couldn't buy a sandwich or a portion of chips after midnight in the West End. London in the 1970s and 80s was not a 24-hour city, except maybe for the parts of Kensington where Arabs, Australians and Africans kept the shops open at night. A "late night" supermarket was one that staued open till 8. It was possible to get chucked out of a West End pub at closing time on a mid-week evening, and if you wanted a bite to eat you could walk down to Charing Cross Station past bars and cafes closing all round you, get on a train to Lewisham or Deptford or Greenwich and be more likely to get something down there.
What life there was in central London after midnight was due to what industry there was left. The print at Fleet Street and Holborn, the markets at Covent Garden and Smithfield, the huge post office at Mount Pleasant, the mainline stations, the hospitals. The people who worked in those places wanted to eat and drink, and the services they needed grew up around them. So the late-night cafes, the early-morning bars, the brothels, and the drinking clubs were largely concentrated round these places, sprad across the northern part of the inner ring of London from Spitalfields ththrough Clerkenwell and Kings Cross to Soho, where it bumped into artistic and tourist London and got brielfy interesting.
One by one the industrial businesses closed, moved out or were "downsized". The last trains from Victoria, Euston or Charing Cross used to leave at 3 or 4 - now it is just after midnight (before on some lines). The markets mostly moved out. The printworkers were locked out and new ones hired to work in the East End.
The deadest part of London was the City, the famous Square Mile. Don't believe them when they tell you that business goes round the clock. It was the printers and the railway workers who kept the shops and the pubs open in the City. After Big Bang it was possible to walk from London Bridge to Liverpool Street via the Bank at 8 o'clock on a Wednesday evening and find one open pub (and it was a dump). The City Corporation had to refuse planning permission for developments that would close bars - if you bought land with licensed premises on it you had to promise to keep the bar open before you were allowed to rebuild. The City wasn't a city at all, it was an industrial estate and the industry was finance.
The closed Flower and Fruit Market at Covent Garden is in the hinge between 4 quarters of central London - University London was to the immediate north, just 2 or 3 blocks away as the Americans would say, in Bloomsbury. Government & Legal London almost surround it to the south and east, and Theatre and artistic London starts there and at nearby Drury Lane and march off to the West. It is all just 5 minutes tube ride from the City, and 10 minutes walk from the "new media" hive at Soho. If we wanted to keep the centre of London alive, that was the place to start.
They were going to build an office block at Covent Garden, but it was prevented. Between the toffs at the Royal Opera and the lefties on the GLC they saved the old market hall and turned it into a public space. It was going to be the heart of a new, lively London, attracting tourists and preserving the working-class charcter of the area. For a few years it almost worked. We used to go there for a pint after work now and again. You could hang around in the day and watch the buskers - there was always something going on - even if was about as ersatz as a SCA "Renaissance Fair".
But it got too popular. By the late 80s the pubs round Covent Garden were crowded with people having that drink after work (just as we were). It got packed with City types out on the piss. Sometimes it looked as if half the accountants in Australia were throwing back lager as quickly as they could. Sometimes it felt like having a drink on the Picadilly Line in the rush-hour.
So the businesses tried to move upmarket. Who wouldn't? There was all that money lying around waiting to be spent. I passed though it one morning a few days ago, on my way to college for an exam. Mostly it was shut, waiting for the tourists to turn up - tourists don't get into town before 10 o'clock in the morning. It was full of the kind of shops you get in upmarket shopping malls
Oh, it is pleasant enough. But the buzz has gone. The diversity, the unpredictability, the spontaneity, all gone. These days you'd be more likely to find that on the South Bank. If you want to walk around in the evening, have a pleasant pint or two, maybe a bite to eat, try Coin Street or Bankside. Or Greenwich even. If you want some buzz, try Brixton. If you have moral qualms about going south of the river, then Earl's Court and Bayswater are still more 24-hour than the West End and Camden sometimes more lively and usually more fun.
Covent Garden isn't a bad place, the buildings are nice enough, but it can be bloody boring at times. A shopping mall with an opera house attached. Except there isn't even an opera any more.